“The resentment I felt inside was not hatred for being imprisoned or for Victor who had betrayed me but something deeper: a rebellion against the very way of things that condemned men to be imprisoned inside their own identities.”

“It was very sad, he thought. The things men carried inside. The things men did or felt they had to do. ”

“A man is a beautiful thing, a very beautiful thing. But some men forget this. And sometimes they try to keep other men captive. They buy and sell people, as if human beings are no more than cattle. But only a fool believes he can really own another man, and only a fool will try. Mr. Finley may own my body, but I have a heart and I have a mind, and he can never own these. Inside of me, I'm too powerful to be owned by anyone. Inside, I am like the sun.”

“What a stupendous, what an incomprehensible machine is man! Who can endure toil, famine, stripes, imprisonment and death itself in vindication of his own liberty, and the next moment . . . inflict on his fellow men a bondage, one hour of which is fraught with more misery than ages of that which he rose in rebellion to oppose.”

“Those who were so long imprisoned in ice and darkness seem to find the sunlight jarring, painful. The longer I walk around with this grief inside me, the more I understand that. It’s as if sunshine is a slap in the face that says, Look, the world’s all bright and shiny! Too bad you’re not.”

“Prim a doctor. She couldn't even dream of it in 12. Something small and quiet, like a match being struck, lights up the gloom inside me. This is the sort of future a rebellion could bring.”